The right-wing nationalism of Donald Trump is once again ascendent in Europe, or at least in Italy, as a new populist government takes power in Rome. The new ruling coalition had initially been rejected by President Sergio Mattarella over fears that the incoming leaders’ enthusiasm for withdrawing from the euro could spark another financial crisis on the continent. On Thursday, however, the far-right League and anti-establishment Five Star movement announced they had reached a compromise: despite widespread skepticism, the political neophyte Giuseppe Conte will still serve as prime minister, but Eurosceptic Paolo Savona, who campaigned for Brexit and has mused about whether Italy would be better off leaving the E.U., will be quarantined in a ministerial post, leaving the pivotal role of finance minister in the more capable hands of economic professor Giovanni Tria.

That trade-off should assuage anxieties as to whether the rise of Italian populism poses a threat to Italy’s position in the Eurozone—it will, temporarily, at least, negate the threat of a snap election that might well have garnered further support for anti-E.U. parties. But while the establishment has uttered a shaky (likely short-lived) sigh of relief, patriot-for-hire Steve Bannon’s valedictory yawp is reverberating across Europe. Bannon, after all, has become something of a citizen of the world following his exile from the White House. After failing to elect a populist candidate in Alabama, Bannon took his nationalist roadshow to Europe, where he found himself deeply immeshed in Italian politics. Back in March, he met with League leader Matteo Salvini, whose rise to power has been motored by racism, and urged him to partner with Five Star, whose catchphrase “vaffanculo” means “fuck off.”

It was, in other words, a match made in heaven for Bannon, whose dreams of a right-left political realignment in the U.S. collapsed with Trump’s adoption of a mostly party-line Republican agenda. “You are the first guys who can really break the left and right paradigm,” Bannon said he told Salvini when he pitched the partnership. “You can show that populism is the new organizing principle.”

Italy, of course, was a natural starting point for Bannon’s global vision for a nationalist revolution: not only does the country possess a fertile right-wing base, it also boasts a delectable cuisine, and an array of opulent five-star hotels from which to celebrate the forgotten man. Checking into Milan’s Principe di Savoia hotel, the former Goldman Sachs banker gave an interview to The New York Times in March laying out his vision for an inverted E.U.: an interlocking network of populist uprisings across Europe that would ultimately destroy the political establishment. “All I’m trying to be,” he explained humbly, “is the infrastructure, globally, for the global populist movement.”

Earlier this week, Bannon was back, this time in Rome, where he was once again busy peddling his version of la dolce vita. “Italy is in crisis,” he declared to a small audience, from his position in front of a red velvet curtain. The crisis, he explained, stems firstly from Mattarella’s fascistic decision to veto Savona as finance minister, and, secondly, his move to ask Carlo Cottarelli, the ex-IMF leader dubbed Mr. Scissors, to stand-in as a caretaker leader. ”They have the chutzpah to put in another technocrat,” he stormed, “What is more fascist than taking away 60 percent or more of what the people voted for?”

“It’s disgusting, but it shows you if you need any other evidence of how anti-democratic it is, when they sit there, and in their media, talk about, ‘Oh, this is fascism, oh, this is going to take us back to the 1930s, this is anti-democratic,” the former media mogul continued, skirting over the fact that he, too, is trying to forge a globalist movement, though one that looks more like 1913 than 1933. “Look at how they roll. Foreign powers, foreign capital, foreign media took from the Italian people its sovereignty.”